For over a year I’ve had the honor of sponsoring a new born and teen in
northern China through the Children’s Bridge Foundation. I blogged about the
Foundation last year in the support of a life saving operation for the
little boy, Son Pham.

Today I had the pleasure of speaking with Shelly Page, Vice-President of the
Foundation about their new campaign to assist orphaned children in Nazareth,
Ethiopia.

As Shelly describes in this conversation, CBF was introduced to a school
where children don’t received breakfast before coming to school, and the
school day ends at lunch because kids have to find something to eat.

The Children’s Bridge Foundation does remarkable work and needs the support
of the global community. They are in the process of re-building their
website, but donations and volunteers are welcome and needed.

Children’s Bridge Foundation
1400 Clyde Avenue, Suite 221
Ottawa, Ontario
CANADA
K2G 3J2

Phone: +1 613-226-2112
Fax: +1 613-226-8843
info@childrensbridgefoundation.com

On today’s show we speak with Bohne Forsberg about the Design Process Manifesto he created from over 20 years experience in the field of design.

We also talk about Seth Godin’s The Dip and the important differences between failing and quitting along with several shared experiences on projects as it relates to each area of the Design Process Manifesto.

You can find the most recent podcasts from UX Week in San Francisco on the Boxes and Arrows Podcast. You can also subscribe to the Boxes and Arrows Podcast in iTunes.

Teresa Brazen’s talk with Audrey Chen from Comedy Central can be heard at Tea with Teresa.

Be sure to make your way to Chicago for the IDEA conference to hear a brilliant line-up of speakers.

I’ve been sketching, drawing, and painting my whole life. I have yet to find any piece of software that can replace the flexibility of a pencil and piece of paper.

This also holds true for project planning; innovating; problem solving long standing issues, and the like. Tape up flip chart paper around the room, hand everyone a marker, and let the conversations begin! Anything that gets people to engage each other away from a computer screen, is always a huge step forward to gathering the best ideas.

Frog has been a leader in design for several years, and now they have produced a print magazine illustrating their work:

We’re launching a print magazine, because I think print really is the new black. Everybody thinks print is out but at the end of the day what we found is someone wants something in their hands and they do want to read something.

Creating a magazine for design also speaks to the notion that people don’t take the time to lose themselves in a good website like they do a great book or magazine.

I’ve been working on a similar notion about creating a print magazine like the one shown in the video below for IA and UX professionals. We spend a lot of time trying to define IA and UX. Perhaps the next step in moving this conversation forward is to share examples of our work in a format that we know others will take the time to read, digest, and debate.

Daniel Goleman, respected Psychologist and author of many publications, including one of my favorites, Emotional Intelligence, gives a thought provoking talk about our innate human desire to care for others.

Emotional Intelligence (EI) is ultimately the capacity to manage the emotions of self, others, or groups. EI has been identified by many experts as the key to success in life both personally and professionally.

As Don Norman and Peter Merholz illustrated in their discussion at UX Week, we are designing solutions for other people, not “users”. Don also pointed out during his keynote presentation that we need to stop using phrases like, “We need to make this idiot proof for our users”, implying our “users” are idiots; which of course, they are not.

All of which is to say, we need to be focusing on the emotional component of what inspires people, and spend less time worrying about whether business and government are aligning with the latest fad.

Understanding the social animals we are, and our inherent need to connect with other people, EI is a critical area of Psychology for all those in the fields of IA, IxDA, UX, and HCI to learn more about. Through a deeper understanding of how we think, learn, and behave, we can have more productive conversations with colleagues and clients, creating a corporate culture where innovation can thrive.

Daniel Goleman brought the notion of “EI” to prominence as an alternative to more traditional measures of IQ with his 1995 mega-best-seller Emotional Intelligence.

Since the publication of that book, conferences and academic institutes have sprung up dedicated to the idea. EI is taught in public schools, and corporate leaders have adopted it as a new way of thinking about success and leadership. EI, and one’s “EIQ,” can be an explanation of why some “average” people are incredibly successful, while “geniuses” sometimes fail to live up to their promise.

I had the pleasure of meeting Josh Porter, author of designing for the Social Web at the I.A. Summit earlier this year in Miami. In his book, Josh discusses how to design for collective intelligence, authentic conversations, sharing, and on-going participation, to name a few.

I’ve learned from research, project work, and interviewing subject-matter experts in the fields of IA, IxDA, HCI, and UX that content is merely a driver for face-to-face conversations that provide the highest level of understanding and clarity of thought.

You experience this all the time at conferences. The presentations may be incredible, but it’s the discussions you have with others between sessions that are of greatest value.

A sentiment that I’ve been talking to others in the public and private sector for years is that technology is simply not the foundational problem impacting an organizations’ capacity to deliver. People are your foundation, not the slick new piece of technology you just purchased or have created. Josh illustrates this idea beautifully here and throughout his book:

No matter how great the technology you’re using, it can’t solve what are fundamentally human social problems. Garnering interest, getting people excited and talking about your software: the thing we really want to take is real poeple making human-to-human contact. There is no way around it. So forget easy technological solutions. Technology might help you along the way, but it can’t have conversations for you and it’s no substitute for human interaction.

Podcasting for the IA Podcast and for Boxes and Arrows, I’ve come to realize that this medium actually models Josh’s idea that there is “…no substitute for human interaction.”

Podcasting extends the voice of others beyond the tidal wave of blog posts and white papers and gets to the heart of the matter; quickly and simply.

This is a major shift from traditional business philosophies about needing to control the message. The reality is information about any subject is available to anyone at anytime. Giving up control, as the paradox goes, actually allows you to garner more of it.

Don’t try and stop the conversation – join it!

I’m a huge fan of Clifford Stoll. “A mind like no other!” is how I describe Mr. Stoll to those who have yet to have the pleasure of hearing his ideas.

From his illustrious career as an astronomer to his thought provoking publications: High-Heretic, Cuckoos Egg, and Silicon Snake Oil, Clifford Stoll is genius personified – demonstrating an equal passion for art and science when looking at the world.

An astronomer (though his astronomy career took a turn when he noticed a bookkeeping error that ultimately led him to track down a notorious hacker), researcher and internationally recognized computer security expert — who happens to be a vocal critic of technology — Stoll makes a sharp, witty case for keeping computers out of the classroom. Currently teaching college-level physics to eighth graders at a local school, he stays busy in his spare time building Klein bottles.

Memory is more important than reality when attempting to build great user experiences. This was one of the main ideas shared by Don Norman at UX Week.

Having a background in cognitive and behavioral psychology, I’m always more interested in learning about the “why” and “how” when discussing people and technology.

Following Don’s suggestion that memory is more important than reality; recent research has shown that our brains are anything but dormant when we sleep; and how this processing actually strengthens our memories:

The latest research suggests that while we are peacefully asleep our brain is busily processing the day’s information…sleep not only strengthens memories, it also lets the brain sift through newly formed memories, possibly even identifying what is worth keeping and selectively maintaining or enhancing these aspects of memory.

As social animals, not internet chatting / texting drones, people’s memories are strengthened by emotionally powerful events. The reconciling force in creating a great user experience is to understand the values of big business and designers; regardless of your title, position, or status in your organization.

When a picture contains both emotional and unemotional elements, sleep can save the important emotional parts and let the less relevant background drift away. It can analyze collections of memories to discover relations among them or identify the gist of a memory while the unnecessary details fade – perhaps even helping us find the meaning in what we have learned.

A good night’s sleep can actually help people discover purpose in their own efforts, improving clarity of thought and ultimately process. Perhaps if we spent more time understanding how people learn and less time debating the pros and cons of things like Google Chrome; we could achieve a better user experience both within and outside of the web:

As exciting findings such as these come in more and more rapidly, we are becoming sure of one thing: while we sleep, our brain is anything but inactive. It is now clear that sleep can consolidate memories by enhancing and stabilizing them and by finding patterns within studied material even when we do not know that patterns might be there. It is also obvious that skimping on sleep stymies these crucial cognitive processes: some aspects of memory consolidation only happen with more than six hours of sleep. Miss a night, and the day’s memories might be compromised – an unsettling thought in our fast-paced, sleep deprived society.

Boxes and Arrows published the ten conversations I put together at UX Week, late last night. While at the conference I had the pleasure of talking with several of the presenters and those leading workshops at UX Week.

Peter Merholz, President of Adaptive Path was kind enough to interview Don Norman from feedback about the keynote. Kim Lenox, senior Interaction Designer at Adaptive Path helped out as well, interviewing Kevin Brooks from Motorola Labs. Thanks guys – great ideas shared in both shows.

The following discussions can be found at Boxes and Arrows or you can also subscribe to the Podcast in iTunes. This will allow you to capture all of the discussions I’ve had the privledge of producing to date; 53 and counting!

UX Week Keynote Discussion – Peter Merholz talks with Don Norman

Being a UX Team of One – Leah Buley

Story Telling for User Experience Design – Kevin Brooks and Kim Lenox

Unpacking Stories to Serve People Better – Indi Young

We’ll Always Have Paris: What Makes a Memorable Service Experience? – Jennifer Bove and Ben Fullerton

ben: A Prototype for Democracy in the 21st Century – Dave Wolf

TV With an API! – Current at the Collision of TV and the Internet – Rod Naber and Dan Levine

A User’s Guide to Managing Experience Teams – Google’s Margaret Gould Stewart and Graham Jenkin

New Paradigms for Interaction in Physical Space – Jake Barton

Conversation with Adaptive Path’s New CEO – Michael W. Meyer

I’ll be attending the upcoming IDEA Conference in Chicago to produce more conversations for the Boxes and Arrows Podcast…stay tuned!

Mozilla labs recently came out with Aurora, in partnership with Jesse James Garret, providing a future glimpse into how we may communicate, share data, and interact with both information and people.

I’ve been using Twitter to follow a number of people in the fields of IA, IxDA, UX, and HCI. David Armano, VP of Experience Design at Critical Mass, recently sent out a “tweet” about this video from Aza Raskin, head of User Experience at Mozilla labs on the release of Ubiquity.

We want to empower the user to be able to make mash-ups on their own; not to wait for a developer to do that for them. Enter ubiquity…connecting the web to language.

Ubiquity appears to be combining Command Line Interface with Graphic User Interface to create an intuitive web experience; and doing it quite well, I might add!

Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.